This invention relates generally to a safety system for transport vehicles and, more particularly, to a combination safety seat and restraint mechanism for such vehicles.
Vehicle passenger safety systems of many types have been developed and proposed for reducing the number of serious and fatal injuries suffered by passengers of various kinds of transport vehicles and particularly of automotive vehicles. This activity has been greatly accentuated in recent years in response to pressures exerted by incumbent departments of both Federal and state governments.
Vehicle safety systems can be separated into several broad categories, one of which encompasses restraint systems including both active versions that require some form of passenger action and passive versions that do not. A serious drawback of active restraint systems is that even when available their use is generally ignored by a large segment of the motoring public. This is particularly true of the more cumbersome albeit more effective types such as shoulder and upper torso harnesses. Conversely, relatively simple active restraints such as the well-known lap belt, although utilized more extensively, are not satisfactorily effective in reducing serious injury and in certain instances can even become contributing factors thereto. For example, it has been demonstrated that at the time of a collision a passenger can sometimes slip under a lap belt and suffer internal injuries due to an abnormal compression on his abdomen by the belt. Passive restraint systems including primarily the highly publicized air bag systems similarly have failed for a number of reasons to provide an adequate level of vehicle passenger safety and, again, in many instances can even cause injury-related accidents. For example, the inadvertent activation of certain air bag systems can obscure the vision of an operator resulting in a loss of vehicle control and ultimate collision thereof with an encountered obstruction. Thus, prior restraint systems have failed to satisfy presently desired objectives for passenger safety.
Another category of vehicle safety systems features passenger seats that respond to collision by undergoing some form of movement intended to reduce the risk of injury to the seat's occupant. In most systems of this kind, collision-induced deceleration forces are employed to produce movement of a safety seat into a safer position, often into a postion for absorbing the forward momentum of its occupant. These movable safety seat systems likewise have proven either totally impractical or at least less than fully satisfactory for a variety of reasons including their use of movement mechanisms requiring activating force components not actually produced during typical collisions, their failure to insure that a passenger will be restrained in a safer position in the period immediately following an initial collision, a requirement for exorbitantly costly and cumbersome operating mechanisms; a tendency for critical components to be damaged during initial stages of collision and thereby prevent intended movement of a seat into a safer position; their failure to establish for a safety seat a final position in which an occupant is satisfactorily protected from all contingencies such as variously directed subsequent impacts experienced by a vehicle after an initial collision, etc.
The object of this invention, therefore, is to provide an improved safety system that will more reliably prevent personal injury to passengers of transport vehicles involved in accidental collisions.